ORANGE COUNTY FOCUS : IN PERSON : Sound of Birds Chirping Is Music to His Ears

SAN CLEMENTE —  As stereotypes go, Ken Fortune looks more like the plumber he was for 25 years than the bird-watcher he has been for 15.

He’s built like a fullback, relatively short and stocky, with the strong hands that come from wrestling with heavy pipe wrenches and unruly hot water heaters. But this burly guy’s idea of a good time is listening to songbirds.

“It’s a spiritual thing for me,” said Fortune, 44, a San Clemente resident who lives with his wife and 5-year-old son. “Some people go to church. I just spent a weekend in Joshua Tree where, instead of freeway noise, you wake up to the songs of cactus wrens. It’s good for your soul.”

At home, he generally rises in the morning to the sounds of northern mockingbirds, house finches and morning doves--all merely common locals to southern Orange County, but to birders like Fortune, remarkable nonetheless.

“If you see these magnificent creatures in their element and understand how they function, it’s just amazing,” Fortune said. “Some of them have been around so long, they go back to the dinosaur era.”

Orange County, home to more than 200 of the 890 known feathered species in the entire country, is a birder’s paradise, he said.

“That’s because we are on the Pacific flyway, we have good weather and there is still some habitat left. But we need to do what we can to save the habitat we have,” he explained.

Fortune’s favorite places for bird-watching include Ronald W. Caspers Wilderness Park near San Juan Capistrano, Newport Beach’s Back Bay, Laguna Niguel Regional Park and the wetlands areas near Bolsa Chica State Beach in Huntington Beach and Trestles, a surfing area at the mouth of a creek bed south of the old Nixon Western White House in San Clemente.

“We live in an incredible place,” he said of South County. “With Camp Pendleton and the Cleveland National Forest, we have the longest stretch of undeveloped land between Santa Barbara and Tijuana.”

Fortune’s intense interest in birding has led to a parallel interest in the environment.

Both began when he bought his wife a subscription to Audubon magazine as a gift.

“My wife said, ‘Let’s go look at birds,’ and I said, ‘sure,’ and we went to the most famous place for birds around--Mission San Juan Capistrano. All they really have there are pigeons and crows and swallows, but we didn’t care,” he said.

Fortune offers the tiny Capistrano swallow as a case in point of the magnificence of birds as creatures who have adapted over eons to fit their needs.

“Here is a bird that weighs about 19 grams . . . about the weight of four nickels . . . and it flies each year from Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America to San Juan Capistrano,” he said. “There is something about these creatures that the more you understand about them, the more you develop an appreciation for them.”

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Then there are the birds of prey that struggle to survive in rapidly developing South County. These are birds which “have been around since Christ walked the earth and are still searching for food, surviving and scratching out an existence,” he said.

The area is home to a wide variety of hawks, most of which rely on their incredibly sharp eyesight--focused through three eyelids--for their existence, Fortune said. An example is the red-shouldered hawk, which can be seen perched on telephone wires or light poles, scanning open fields below.

“Their vision is eight times better than ours. We would have to have tennis ball-sized eyes to match them,” he said.

Fortune’s favorites are the most colorful of local birds, like the hummingbirds or the western tanager, a bird with patches of red, yellow and black that he suggests “for beauty is hard to beat.”

“A human being could not paint a picture as striking as this creature,” Fortune said. “Seen in the sunlight, it’s just incredible.”

Fortune’s son, Benji, is already something of a birder. They will watch the bird feeders at their house for various species and together rush to their bird book to identify them.

“He can already name a handful of them. Birding is a great thing to share with kids,” Fortune said.

But his thoughts on his child’s birding interests, and the future of bird-watching in Orange County in general, are all wrapped up in the future of the prime bird habitat, which Fortune said is dwindling.

Bird habitat often tends to be regarded as prime development areas, he said.

“What are we going to leave for our children, a bunch of concrete and redevelopment agencies, or a natural heritage we all can be proud of?” Fortune said. “The habitat is dwindling. Get out there and get a good look at it while it’s here, folks.”

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Profile: Ken Fortune

Age: 44

Hometown: Pasadena

Residence: San Clemente

Came to Orange County: 1955

Education: Loara High School graduate (Anaheim) 1969, extensive courses at Saddleback College

Family: Wife, Sachiko Fukuman, is a dentist; 5-year-old son

Background: Former president, current membership chairman, South Coast Audubon Society; owner, Fortune’s Plumbing for 10 years; manages family properties

On bird-watching: “Some people go to church. I just spent a weekend in Joshua Tree where, instead of freeway noise, you wake up to the songs of cactus wrens. It’s good for your soul.”

Source: Ken Fortune; Researched by LEN HALL / Los Angeles Times